


stars round his wrists

by peridium



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s11e10 The Devil Is In The Details, M/M, POV Lucifer, POV Outsider, Possession, The Power Of Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-23
Updated: 2016-01-23
Packaged: 2018-05-15 19:02:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5796175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peridium/pseuds/peridium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As he faces Dean Winchester and arranges his features into his best Castiel impression, the body’s fingers twitch. A tiny movement, inexplicable until Castiel’s awareness tries to stir and Lucifer realizes, and narrowly dodges a bark of laughter. Castiel wants to touch. He <i>always</i> wants to touch Dean. He has wanted to touch Dean so many times, across such a number of years, that the desire has become bodily instinct.</p><p><i>Oh, Castiel.</i> (11.10 coda.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	stars round his wrists

**Author's Note:**

> That feeling when you get this weird urge to write Lucifer's point of view on possessing Castiel, and then... well, and then.
> 
> I'm on Tumblr at [sunbeamdean](http://sunbeamdean.tumblr.com). The title is from the Neko Case song "John Saw That Number."

Castiel’s vessel—his _body_ ; no one else shares it with him, and if that isn’t novel and fascinating—is well-loved. Scouring its corners and valleys clean of Castiel’s influence proves more difficult than he might have liked, and he has taken many vessels in his time.

He does it, of course, and in a matter of seconds. Lucifer’s very good at what he does, and the ends have always justified the means.

It’s, well. Not that you heard it from him, but it’s disconcerting to inhabit a form that should feel empty and instead feels worn. That has its own quirks and habits, the specific hunch of Castiel’s shoulders and the damned perpetual squint.

As he faces Dean Winchester and arranges his features into his best Castiel impression, the body’s fingers twitch. A tiny movement, inexplicable until Castiel’s awareness tries to stir and Lucifer realizes, and narrowly dodges a bark of laughter. Castiel wants to touch. He _always_ wants to touch Dean. He has wanted to touch Dean so many times, across such a number of years, that the desire has become bodily instinct.

_Oh, Castiel._

Sparks flare from the metaphysical corner into which Lucifer has tucked his reluctant charge. _I consented to acting as your vessel, not to being mocked._

Lucifer laughs aloud once the Winchesters have driven away. “In for a penny,” he says, “in for a pound.”

 

Castiel has it bad. Actually, that’s a pathetic understatement.

The use of his body as a vessel won’t last forever, not with a seraph and an archangel crowding things, not when this body was meant to house Castiel rather than Lucifer. As half measures go, it’s not bad—with just the one superhuman inhabitant, Jimmy Novak’s likeness has gotten some serious upgrades—but Lucifer still has his eye on the prize. Sam Winchester.

Get close to one Winchester, you get close to the other. That’s the rule, the too-easy trick Heaven and Hell alike have been passing around for years now.

Lucifer begins by scrolling back through Castiel’s phone, plucking its passcode easily from Castiel’s head. There are hundreds of messages with Dean. Something useful is sure to make itself known.

Three hundred and twenty-five texts later, Satan, prince of lies, the Morningstar, the lightbringer, has learned the following:

The angel Castiel, who once inhaled countless souls and declared himself God, found the season finale of _Jessica Jones_ incredibly moving, and used no fewer than five emojis to express that.

Dean Winchester, righteous man, is overbearing and fussy to a sickening extent matched only by Castiel himself. If there’s a Guinness World Record for frequency of the exchange _Sure you’re okay?_ followed by _Yes but what about you_ and all minute variations thereon, these two will definitely be taking home the prize.

As Lucifer scrolls faster and faster, growing bored and impatient while his amusement fades, Castiel refuses to remain silent. He presses at the boundaries of Lucifer’s confinement. The guttering light of his grace flares, and it’s almost endearingly pitiful. He considers this record of inanity something special, private. Something Lucifer should have the decency to leave alone.

Angels don’t get privacy, and neither do fallen angels. That’s a human privilege, and perhaps Castiel needs a reminder that he is not a human.

Neither of them are. They aren’t allowed the vagaries and indulgences their father granted his final and most prized creation. Castiel’s heart squeezes in Lucifer’s chest as they pass a months-old message from Dean, only just restored to humanity after his fling with black eyes, that reads, _Thanks buddy its good to be back keep your nose clean._

Lucifer tightens his hold over Castiel. Ice creeps through their shared blood vessels.

 

“Hey,” Dean says, smiling when he holds open the bunker door so Castiel’s body can pass through upon tacit invitation. The wards would have kept even Lucifer out otherwise. “You cleaned up pretty okay.”

A fluttering in Lucifer’s ribcage. The schadenfreude has begun wearing thin, and he’s close to irritation that these flickers of feeling persist in interrupting his focus on his goal. “You and Sam are okay, too?” he asks.

“Yeah.” Dean’s smile comes back full force. He keeps looking, eyes fixed on the person he thinks is Castiel as they descend the stairs. “Yeah, I think so. I’m making Sam rest up.”

Lucifer is treading on thin ice. He’s cracked open the door to where he’s holding Castiel’s consciousness, in need of his guidance as he keeps up his imitation. “And yourself?”

Dean shrugs the question away. He cracks open two beers on the edge of the kitchen counter and tosses one Lucifer’s way.

This moment, improbably, feels riskier than anything had over the last centuries of literal hellfire. Castiel, subdued but unhappy, is thinking about struggling. Lucifer can sense it. He takes a long drink of the beer, tasting nothing, and he warns Castiel: _I can kill him in a moment if I don’t like the way you’re acting._

It’s the wrong move. Castiel cracks open, spills forth, supernova-bright such that even Lucifer is, for a long, long moment, blinded. _You will not_ , he snarls, and their shared body staggers, catching itself against the back of a nearby chair.

Satan will tell you that he fell for love, and he will stand by that until existence unravels for good. But the rest of the world, all its lore and myth, will argue that he fell for the most cliché kind of fatal flaw: hubris. Pride came before his fall.

Now, faced with the white-hot protectiveness and longing that Castiel casts about the mere thought of Dean Winchester, Lucifer is humbled.

He’d been laughing. He’d needled Castiel, thinking it must be that mouth or those metaphor-worthy eyes of Dean’s. Now he sees, as he wrests control back, the luminosity of Dean’s soul as Castiel experiences it.

Castiel is already going back under, strong but not strong enough. But a thousand images are playing out across the no-man’s-land between their graces. Dean wretched in Hell, the painstaking and endless instant during which Castiel had threaded his body back together and cleansed his soul, a multitude of glances and touches. All of it locked away, indelible and unforgettable in the deepest, best-guarded parts of Castiel’s impeccable memory.

“Whoa,” Dean’s saying. It wouldn’t have been more than a split-second’s stumble from his point of view, but Castiel is rarely clumsy. Already the façade is slipping, and Lucifer’s time is running out. Dean steps close and cups Castiel’s elbow in his hand, which is warm and broad.

“I’m fine,” Lucifer says. He allows himself another swallow of beer. Yeast and fermentation. The alcohol burns out of his system before it’s had a chance to take any effect. “It’s been a long…”

Dean’s laugh finishes the sentence for him. “Yeah, you’re tellin’ me.”

Lucifer has control of this vessel. But as Dean tilts his bottle toward him, a lazy man’s toast, his gaze stays at Dean’s face. He notes the golden tips of Dean’s eyelashes. And he feels Castiel again, slow and inexorable determination. _If nothing else,_ Castiel says, clear as a bell, _if you take everything else from me while you have me, until you use me up and burn me out, I will love this man._

This love is going to be dangerous.


End file.
